Balls have been used throughout the ages for many purposes, but perhaps no purpose has been more popular than recreation, such as sports. Many sports include the use of balls, such as, but not limited to, football, soccer, volleyball, water polo, golf, baseball, basketball, pool, tennis, racquetball, rugby, and the like.
The balls that are used in these sports, especially at the professional level, must conform to strict specifications, which include size, weight, shape, texture, and durability. In most cases, however, players, especially novices, do not benefit by training with balls that adhere to professional level specifications, since their skills are usually not honed enough to manipulate the balls effectively. Accordingly, many players use training balls to train for various sports, including soccer.
Traditionally, training balls have had specifications that differ from actual game balls, such as different weights, sizes, shapes, surface textures, and the like. In some instances, such as soccer, external equipment, such as a leash, has been included to make training easier. In soccer, for example, a desirable skill a player often trains to obtain is the ability to dribble the ball well. Learning to dribble a soccer ball well can be difficult to learn, since controlling a soccer ball with one's feet can be difficult, especially when the weight of a soccer ball is either too heavy or too light for a user, or the surface texture is too slippery.
Traditionally, soccer balls used for training have included only a leash connected to the ball, which can be worn by the user, and which allows the user to practice dribbling the ball while maintaining control of the ball via the leash. Furthermore, traditional training balls have been non-configurable, thus denying the player the ability to incrementally increase or decrease the difficulty of the training by changing certain characteristics of the training ball. Therefore most training balls can be cumbersome to use, such as in the case of a soccer ball leash, and do not effectively develop a player's skills since they do not allow the player to practice without equipment such as a leash, and they do not offer the player the ability to customize the specification of the training ball, which would provide incremental stages of difficulty to help the player develop his or her skills.